Gardener Simeon Guttenhöfer gives a guided tour of the Hugoldsdorf estate garden and explains his vision.
The estate garden in Hugoldsdorf has been used for horticultural purposes for centuries. Before 1945, it was the estate's house garden. After the expropriation of the lords of the manor, the people who lived closely together in the two manor houses, many of whom had been expelled from the East, divided up the grounds into plots. After reunification in 1989, the house and grounds were abandoned and almost everything became overgrown. When the property was bought free in 2006 to turn it into a usufructuary property, the high-trunk orchard, the hedges and old groups of trees were removed, the garden was made usable for our own vegetables and the park was generously cut free. Paths were created and kept clear and individual places, a meadow, a tree, a seating area, were maintained.
I, Simeon Guttenhöfer, have been on site for three years and have started to expand the vegetable garden, work with compost to increase fertility, tend the orchard and make the area even more open with two small suckler cows. For me, the biodynamic way of working is an inexhaustible source. It links farm work to the cultural work of the other people on site. What could modern agriculture look like? It needs points of view that arouse universal interest, so that human labor does not have to be completely replaced by machines, and that allow the natural basis to be seen and experienced not as a dead matrix, but as evolving beings. And it must be practical, manageable and still achieve an increase in fertility.
